England put in a lacklustre performance as they drew 1-1 with Denmark at Euro 2024 and Gary Neville believes Gareth Southgate is failing to get the best out of Declan Rice by using him as a No.6
Gary Neville believes Declan Rice is being held back by Gareth Southgate playing him as a No.6 for England.
Neville felt Rice looked “nervous” during England’s disappointing 1-1 draw with Denmark and suggested he is simply not good enough at playing out from the back to fulfil the role Southgate is asking him to play.
” Mikel Arteta moved Declan Rice out of that position [No.6] for the last 15 games of the season to bring Jorginho and [Thomas] Partey in because he’s not that good at playing there,” Neville told ITV. “Today is the most nervous I’ve seen Declan Rice and he’s a brilliant player.
“I think he’s better moving up the pitch. If you think about what [Toni] Kroos and Rodri and Vitinha does for Portugal, these players who get the team playing… at Manchester United it was Roy Keane and Paul Scholes and it’s Jorginho for Arsenal.
“Every team that’s really great has this type of player nowadays. We don’t seem to have that. Mainoo’s probably the one, Wharton could maybe do it. We have to resolve that problem and I’m talking England generally.
“We’ve never been able to get out from the back properly in moments of pressure. When he goes to receive the ball deep with his back to play, I think he’s quite basic at that. I don’t think he’s as good as the other players who play that position.
“Where I think he’s brilliant is when he’s marauding forward, he’s up on top of the game and he’s aggressive. If you look at his touch map for Arsenal in the last part of the season, most of his touches were in that high left channel.
“For some reason we don’t have that balance in midfield and it’s a massive problem.” Southgate, meanwhile, admitted his current midfield pairing of Rice and Trent Alexander-Arnold is an “experiment” and claimed England are struggling because they “don’t have a natural replacement for Kalvin Phillips “.
He told the BBC : “I wanted to get Conor [Gallagher] on, we needed some energy and to press better. “[Alexander-Arnold] had some moments where he’s delivered what we thought he would.
“We know it’s an experiment and we know that we don’t have a natural replacement for Kalvin Phillips. We’re trying some different things and at the moment we’re not flowing as we’d like, that’s for sure.”
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